“From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I.”
— Psalm 61:2
This place has held a lot of my prayers.
Long before I had the language for most of what I was feeling, I came here. From the time I was about fourteen years old, when life felt too big and too loud and too far outside my control, this was one of the places I would go to sit with God. I would look out over the water, watch the light change, and try to believe my life could still fall into place somehow.
This spot became a place of hope for me. A place to breathe. A place where the world slowed down enough for me to talk to the Lord without feeling like I had to make sense first. I did not always have answers when I left, but I usually had enough steadiness to keep going.
Years later, this same place became part of one of the happiest, messiest, most imperfectly beautiful days of my life. This is where my best friend married my husband and I.
And when I say it was a beautiful mess of a wedding, I mean that with my whole heart.
It was not polished. It was not flawless. But it was ours. And she was there, standing in the middle of it all, bringing the kind of joy only she could bring. Her laughter was the soundtrack of that day, especially when I lost his wedding ring. She had this way of filling a space without trying to own it. She could light up a room just by being in it, and somehow she made people feel lighter too.
That was just who she was.
She was hilarious. She was joy. She was patient, kind, forgiving, and generous in ways that still humble me when I think about them. She loved hard. Not carefully. Not conditionally. Not only when people deserved it. She loved with a kind of boldness that felt like Jesus to me.
But she was also human, and I was blessed to know that part too.
I knew her hurts. I knew some of her sadness. I knew the parts of life that weighed on her, not just the bright pieces everyone else saw. That matters to me, because sometimes when someone dies, people turn them into a flat little saint in memory, as if their goodness only counts if we erase their humanity.
I do not want to do that to her.
Her light was real because it lived inside a real life. A life with pain. A life with hard days. A life with flaws and questions and tired moments. And still, she loved.
I met her when I was three years old. She was not just someone who came into my life for a season and left a few nice memories behind. She was woven into the whole thing. She was there when we were little. She was my maid of honor at my first wedding. She officiated my second. She adopted my youngest child when he was born, because she could not have children of her own.
There are relationships that are hard to explain to people who did not live them with you. We were not as close as adults as we had been when we were younger. Life does that sometimes. People grow up, move through different seasons, carry different responsibilities, and suddenly the daily closeness changes. But she always had time for me. She always supported me. She always believed in me, even when I could not believe in myself.
That kind of love does not disappear just because time and adulthood stretch things out.
In 2018, she died in a car accident.
The accident took more than one life. Her toddler died too. The child I had placed with her was involved and survived, but survival does not mean untouched. There are some sentences that feel too heavy to even write, and that is one of them.
I do not have a softer way to say it.
It was awful.
And it broke something open in me that I did not know how to close.
I had so many whys.
Why her?
Why someone who loved like that?
Why someone who seemed to carry the love of Christ so naturally?
Why did that little child have to die?
Why did the child I placed with her have to lose the mother I had prayed for him to have?
Why did he have to carry that kind of trauma?
What did he do wrong?
Why had I not spent more time with her?
Why had I assumed there would be later?
Why did I take for granted that someone who had been there longer than I could remember would just keep being there?
There are questions that do not come from curiosity. They come from pain. They come from standing in the wreckage of something you cannot fix and looking at God with your hands open, waiting for Him to say something that makes it make sense.
But sometimes there is no answer that would be good enough.
That is one of the hardest truths I have had to learn.
I can know Scripture. I can believe in heaven. I can believe God is sovereign. I can believe Jesus conquered death. I can believe all of that and still say: I do not understand why this happened.
Deuteronomy 29:29 says:
“The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever…”
I do not love that verse in a warm and cozy way.
I respect it.
Because it tells the truth. There are secret things that belong to God. There are things I may never get to understand on this side of heaven. There are answers He has not handed me, and no amount of crying, bargaining, replaying, or torturing myself with what-ifs has changed that.
For a while, that made me angry.
I do not mean a small, polite, church-approved sadness. I mean I was angry. I was confused. My faith faltered. I still believed in Jesus somewhere underneath it all, but I did not know what to do with a God who allowed that kind of loss. I did not know how to pray without asking why. I did not know how to trust without feeling like I was betraying the pain.
And for a season, I did not cope well.
I picked up an unhealthy wine habit for a few months, trying to quiet something that would not be quieted. Grief does that if you let it take over every room in the house of your heart. It does not stay in one corner. It spreads. It gets into your thinking, your sleeping, your relationships, your ability to function, your ability to hope.
My husband carried a lot during that time. He stepped up in a very large way and held weight in our home that I could not hold. My own children were grieving too, especially my daughter. She had been close to my best friend and her children. She had babysat the toddler who died. It was not just my grief. It was all around us.
And I could not fix any of it.
Psalm 34:18 says:
“The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.”
That is the verse I need for this story.
Not because it explains everything.
It does not.
It does not tell me why the accident happened. It does not tell me why some people get long lives and others do not. It does not explain why children suffer, why trauma touches the innocent, or why one phone call can split life into before and after.
It simply says the Lord is near to the brokenhearted.
Near.
That word matters.
Because when grief is fresh, and even years later when it circles back around without asking permission, we often want God to be an explainer. We want Him to sit us down and make the pain add up. We want the math of suffering to work. We want to see the good reason, the purpose, the plan, the part that makes us stop asking why.
But Psalm 34:18 does not promise that the brokenhearted will receive an explanation.
It promises they are not abandoned.
That is not always the comfort we want, but sometimes it is the only comfort strong enough to survive the truth.
God was near when I could not feel Him.
God was near when I was angry.
God was near when my prayers were ugly.
God was near when my faith felt thin and frayed.
God was near when I was trying to numb what needed to be grieved.
God was near when I found my way back into church for the first time in more than fifteen years.
That is part of what still amazes me. The very grief that knocked the breath out of my faith was also part of what eventually brought me back to taking my faith seriously. Not neatly. Not quickly. Not in some pretty little straight line. But slowly, painfully, honestly.
Her death made eternity impossible for me to ignore.
I do not mean that in the sense of earning salvation. I know I cannot work my way into heaven. I know I am not saved because I became a better person, or because I finally started taking things seriously enough, or because grief scared me into better behavior.
We are saved by Christ.
But losing her made heaven real to me in a way I could not tuck away in the background anymore. It made obedience matter more. It made surrender matter more. It made baptism matter more. It made the difference between doing faith my way and doing it God’s way feel a lot less theoretical.
Before that, I believed in Jesus, but I still thought I could handle much of my walk with Him on my own terms.
After that, I could not keep pretending that was enough.
I wanted to see her again.
I still do.
And that longing made me look harder at eternity, at salvation, at surrender, at what it means to actually follow Jesus instead of just believing He exists and continuing to steer my own little ship wherever I feel like taking it.
John 11:35 says:
“Jesus wept.”
It is the shortest verse, but sometimes it feels like one of the heaviest.
Jesus knew Lazarus would live again. He knew resurrection was coming. He knew the ending of the story before anyone else did. And still, He wept.
That tells me something important.
It tells me grief is not a failure of faith.
It tells me tears are not an insult to resurrection.
It tells me that knowing there is hope does not make loss painless.
Jesus did not stand at the tomb and scold everyone for crying. He did not say, “You should know better.” He entered into the grief. He wept with those who wept. He loved, and because He loved, death grieved Him.
That matters when people try to rush grief along.
It matters when someone says something well-meaning but too tidy, like “God needed another angel,” or “Everything happens for a reason,” or “At least she is in a better place.” I know people often say those things because they do not know what else to say, but grief does not need clichés. Grief needs presence. Grief needs room. Grief needs the truth that even Jesus wept.
And then, just a few verses earlier, Jesus says:
“I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”
— John 11:25
That is the hope I have had to hold onto.
Not an answer.
A Person.
Jesus does not give me a full explanation for every loss. He gives me Himself. He gives me the promise that death does not get the final word. He gives me a reason to keep walking toward the day when all of this brokenness is undone.
I still miss her.
I still wish I had spent more time with her. I still wish I had not assumed there would always be another chance. I still wish my child had gotten to grow up with the mother I prayed for him to have. I still wish my daughter did not have that kind of grief in her story. I still wish my husband had not had to watch me fall apart while trying to hold our home together.
I still wish the accident had never happened.
I do not think healing means pretending otherwise.
Some losses are not things we “get over.” We just learn how to carry them differently. We learn how to live with the ache. We learn how to laugh again without feeling like we are betraying the person we lost. We learn how to talk about them without collapsing every time. We learn how to let memory hurt and comfort us at the same time.
I think of her laughter often.
I think of how big she loved. I think of how she made people feel welcomed and wanted. I think of how she could be joyful without being shallow. How she could be kind without being weak. How she could be forgiving without making it look fake. She was one of the clearest pictures of Christlike love I have ever known, and I do not say that lightly.
She was not perfect.
But she loved in a way that pointed past herself.
And maybe part of honoring her life is not turning her into a perfect memory, but letting the way she loved challenge the way I live.
I want to love harder.
I want to forgive better.
I want to be kinder than I feel like being.
I want to stop assuming there will always be later.
I want to take eternity seriously, not out of fear alone, but because this life is shorter and more fragile than we like to admit.
I want to live like seeing people again matters.
I want to follow Jesus in a way that is not half-hearted or convenient or built around my own stubbornness.
Not because I am trying to earn my way to heaven.
Because heaven is real, Christ is real, and I do not want to waste what is left of my life pretending I can do better than obedience.
This photo holds so much of that for me.
It is a lake view, yes. A sunset. A familiar place. But it is also the place where a fourteen-year-old version of me came to pray when life felt impossible. It is the place where I asked God to help my life make sense. It is the place where my best friend stood with me years later and married me to my husband, laughing through the beautiful mess of it all.
It is a place of prayer.
A place of joy.
A place of memory.
A place that reminds me how much can happen between the first time you cry out to God and the years when you look back and realize He was listening, even when you did not understand what He was doing.
I still do not understand why she died.
I do not understand why that child died.
I do not understand why the child I placed with her had to survive such loss.
I do not understand why some people seem to pour light into the world and then leave it so soon.
The secret things belong to the Lord.
I do not say that lightly. I do not say it with a smile. I say it because I have run out of places to put the questions, and God is the only One big enough to hold them.
But I do know this: the Lord is near to the brokenhearted.
I know Jesus wept.
I know He is the resurrection and the life.
I know grief did not get the final word over me, even when it tried.
I know the loss that shook my faith also became part of the road that led me back to church, back to surrender, back to baptism, back to taking my walk with Christ seriously.
I know I still miss her.
And I know I still hope to see her again.
So I keep walking.
Not with every answer.
Not without pain.
Not pretending the loss is smaller than it is.
But walking toward Christ, because He is the only hope strong enough for a grief like this.
And maybe that is what faith looks like after certain losses.
Not a neat answer.
Not a healed-over scar you can barely see.
Not a life untouched by questions.
But a person standing at the edge of the water, remembering the laughter, carrying the ache, and still saying:
Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.
